Revision summary
Human rights are a practice of claims and institutions, not only a declaration. They organise what persons may demand of the state and of social custom. Donnelly and Shue state the equal-claim structure; Shue’s basic rights are the floor. Relativism, class critique, and security exceptions make the practice contested. Indian Articles 17 and 21, Maneka, and group-rights clauses show the three-cornered relation.
Model answer
Introduction
Human rights are not only a list in a treaty. They are a social practice: claims, institutions, and struggles that sort what a person may demand of others, of society, and of the state. The practice is complex because the list is many-layered, and contested because cultures, classes, and states disagree on who is a subject and what is due.
Body
Practice, not a tablet
- Jack Donnelly treated human rights as a regime of equal and inalienable claims against standard threats, especially from the state.
- Henry Shue named basic rights to security, subsistence, and liberty as the floor without which other rights are empty.
- Practice includes petition, litigation, reporting, and movement politics, not only the 1948 Universal Declaration.
- Easton’s allocation language fits: rights are values made authoritative when courts and administrations bind themselves.
Individuals, society, and the state
- Against the state, rights limit police, prison, and censorship. Article 21 jurisprudence and Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978) show that path in India.
- Against society, rights reach custom: Article 17, Vishaka guidelines, and the reading down of Section 377 in Navtej Singh Johar (2018).
- Society also supplies the associations, press, and professions that make rights usable, which Gramsci would call civil society.
- The individual is the formal subject. Group rights in Articles 29 and 30, and Kymlicka’s multicultural argument, complicate that form.
Why contested
- Herskovits and cultural relativism asked whether a Western list travels. The 1993 Vienna Conference answered that rights are universal in claim and diverse in implementation.
- Marx called some rights the rights of the egoistic man of civil society. Ambedkar insisted that civil rights without social democracy are incomplete.
- Security states invoke public order. Developmental states invoke eminent domain. Both contest the scope of rights.
- Foucault notes that rights can coexist with disciplinary institutions. A habeas corpus win does not end the prison as a power.
Complexity
- Generations of rights: civil-political, economic-social, and collective-developmental, sit in one practice and often trade off in budgets.
- National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, and state commissions are statutory practice, not the Constitution’s only door.
- International covenants bind unevenly. Domestic politics decides which clause is live.
- So the statement is accurate: human rights organise a three-cornered relation, and they do so as argument and institution, not as a finished morality.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD HR[Human rights practice] --> I[Individual claims] HR --> S[Society custom civil society] HR --> ST[State limit and duty] HR --> C[Contestation]
Conclusion
Human rights are a contested social practice that binds individuals, society, and the state through claims, courts, and movements. Donnelly and Shue name the structure. Relativism, Marxism, and security politics name the contests. Indian Part III is the local working file.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Can there be universal conception of human rights? Give your arguments
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q2(c)). View answer →
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Are human rights only against the state?
Horizontally they also bind private power and custom, as in Article 17 and workplace sexual-harassment law.
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Does contestation mean rights are unreal?
No. Law is typically contested. Practice is how a claim becomes authoritative allocation.
PYQ trend
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Related PYQs from other years, newest first. Open a question to read it.
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2024 · Q3(a) · PSIR GS 1 · 20 marks
The debate on human rights is caught between the limitations of both universalism and cultural relativism. Comment. -
2021 · Q2(c) · PSIR GS 1 · 15 marks
Can there be universal conception of human rights? Give your arguments
More from this topic
Q3(a) · UPSC Mains 2024 · PSIR GS 1 · 20 marks
The debate on human rights is caught between the limitations of both universalism and cultural relativism. Comment.
Rights
Universalism claims equal human rights for every person; the UDHR and Rawls’s basic liberties are leading statements. Its limit is that lists can reflect one civilisation’s power and can thin out social and cultural claims. Cultural relativism protects diversity and warns against missionary human-rights politics. Its limit is that custom can then shield caste, patriarchy, and authoritarian local power from criticism. The debate is caught between those limits; Habermas and the Indian Constitution seek equal personhood with protected cultural space, not a choice of one pole.
Q2(c) · UPSC Mains 2021 · PSIR GS 1 · 15 marks
Can there be universal conception of human rights? Give your arguments
Rights
Universality of human rights is a claim about persons as persons, stated in the UDHR. A core against torture, slavery, and caste humiliation can be universal; a thick cultural code cannot. Relativism and Marx contest a single bourgeois list; they do not erase a floor. Vienna 1993 joined universality of claim to diversity of form. Habermas locates universality in free deliberation, Rawls in a thinner law of peoples.
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